The mealy-mouthed phrase ‘Oh of course I believe in freedom of speech, but…’ is heard ever more often among those who wish to be seen as nice, progressive, normal and appropriately leftish. And as it creeps further into normal language, it is increasingly not just those on the fringes of the Overton window who fall victim to the ever narrower definition of what is and is not acceptable speech to make freely.

Having mobilised free speech arguments to challenge the status quo from the 1960s onwards, the New Left has by now (for all that it lost the economic one) comprehensively won the culture war. But, having won, the New Left has gone on to develop an ideological immune system to consolidate that victory, and to prevent any insurgent ideas from threatening its hegemony.

One might characterise this immune system as a determined collective capacity to ignore, mock, smear, misrepresent, delegitimise and where necessary deploy more forceful methods of silencing any voice on the fringes of public discourse that challenges its orthodoxies. Adherence to these orthodoxies is enforced – on pain of expulsion from ‘polite society’ – every bit as pervasively as was regular churchgoing once upon a time. Nowhere is this more clear than in the trans juggernaut.

Not content with its admirable achievements in promoting equal treatment for all humans regardless of race, sex or faith, the New Left continues on a relentless pursuit of personal ‘liberation’ for each individual from all restraints of social convention, faith or even pragmatic common sense. Lately, it transpires, we must all go even further, and be liberated even from settled biological fact: men can be female, and women male; all humans must be freed to transcend their own embodied state, to be whatever they feel they are. To gainsay any individual’s personal identity is, now, to commit an act of intensely personal and cruel violence against an individual’s very sense of self and freedom.

The majority of the left sees this straightforwardly in terms of the next civil rights struggle, now that the one for lesbian and gay equality has been won. It is not enough that we have the Gender Recognition Act, which attempts to balance the right to gender self-expression against the rights of women and children to single-sex spaces. Rather trans activism seeks to force into accepted orthodoxy the notion that biological sex is meaningless, and instead all individuals have a ‘gender identity’, which can be changed in law by a simple administrative procedure (I’ve written about this here).

Women who dare ask questions about how this will impact sex discrimination regulations, gendered violence data gathering, pay gap data gathering, women’s shelters, prisons or changing rooms must be treated as though this new shibboleth is already orthodoxy: they must be silenced, utterly. Doxxing, threats of violence, physical assaults, lobbying Parliament to have the phrase ‘trans-identified male’ reclassified as hate crime are some of the tactics in common use. Mumsnet – one of the few online spaces where critical discussion around transgender activism is not heavily moderated – has seen its advertisers targeted by trans activism keen to pressure Mumsnet into implementing a more forceful moderation policy.

Women are being silenced. Left-wing women. Nowhere is this more painfully clear than in the push to deplatform Linda Bellos, a veteran lesbian feminist and founder of Black History Month. The mechanisms employed are the same ones as are used to silence other wicked, excluded voices: smears, harassment, and – wherever possible – the levers of law, power, government. And, because the left long since abandoned its previous spirited defence of free speech in favour of protecting its cultural victories via a policy of selected censorship (‘curated speech’ instead of free speech) left-wing women now have no defence against these parasites hollowing out liberation politics for their own purposes. Those feminists protesting at the female-bodied collateral damage that is starting to pile up up in the cause of freeing men to ‘be women’ are instead facing, at the hands of their former comrades on the left, the same tactics that the left has long since used to consolidate its cultural hegemony.

I shan’t quote anyone directly, but I see the hurt, frustration and rage boiling up. ‘What the fuck do you mean, we’re on the wrong side of history???’. How fucking dare you other, marginalise, smear, delegitimise us, who have so long been dutiful soldiers in the noble cause?

And yet, there it is: without the free speech argument, this will continue. It will get worse. The purges will continue within the left. Maybe we’ll see new orthodoxies starting to creep in that don’t even sound very left-wing at all, but can be justified with reference to liberation, equality, discrimination.

I decided to take this out of my replies to some tweets and do a thread because this ‘Paedophile Manifesto’ is so chilling it needs its own analysis and exposure. I’m only half way through as it is just making me so angry.

I was passed a ‘Paedophile Manifesto’ entitled ‘The handbook’ published 2015 on https://t.co/dIh6IunAPd to have a look at. It spends pages and pages talking about how to normalise what they refer to as ‘Adult-Child Sexual Relationships’. pic.twitter.com/o4RwegIksc

Look, I get it. If you’re a gender-critical feminist, you’re possibly a radical feminist. You’re 99.9999999% likely to be pretty left-wing. The cultural revolution is your baby. But babies grow up, and without checks and balances this one’s growing up mean.

The no-platforming, harassment, mockery, ostracism starts out being just for people you don’t like, and don’t agree with. So you don’t speak up. Then they’re gunning for people you thought were basically okay, but maybe you were wrong and anyway you’re afraid to speak out in case you get blowback. Then, suddenly, they’re coming for people a whole lot like you, to stifle an issue you actually really care about.

This isn’t just about saving women from a misogynistic campaign to abolish legal recognition of sex differences in the name of a spurious freedom to ape the behavioural stereotypes imposed on the opposite sex. It’s about retaining, for the left, the ability to save the left from itself – an ability that looks worryingly to be already hanging by a thread. Gender critical feminists are the canaries in the left-wing coalmine. Without a spirited defence of free speech – yes, even for Tommy Robinson – the left will incrementally be taken over by and for interests a long way from the oppressed, the powerless, the voiceless whom the left claim to wish to represent, lift up and defend. Misogynists; paedophiles; those who seek to reintroduce blasphemy laws. It’s all coming.

Gender critical feminists: this is bigger even than a battle to keep the rights women have won. It’s a fight for the soul of liberation politics. Without a spirited left-wing defence of free speech – and let’s face it, this is a pretty radical suggestion nowadays – the left is a sitting duck. For while its immune system is effective at purging antagonists, it is defenceless against parasites. Transgenderism is just the first of many ideological parasites: it has already colonised most mainstream LGB lobby groups. More will follow, each dripping with the magic aura of liberation, open-mindedness, toleration, equality, justice, inclusion and an end to discrimination. Opposing these parasites will mean falling foul of the prohibition on any thought, speech or action that can be painted as discriminatory, intolerant, exclusionary or bigoted.

The only such defence that stands the test of time is the free speech defence, and that means defending it even for those whose views we dislike. It’s time to hold your noses and stand with Tommy Robinson.

If you look at the people who advocate for votes at 16, they are invariably well-insulated from the consequences of bad politics. Teenagers typically live with their parents and do not pay tax (or certainly the kind of teenager who gets het up about the franchise is unlikely to be already in work and living independently) and as such have relatively little stake in the hard consequences that result from a general election, except at one remove via their parents.

The kind of teenager who gets passionately het up about politics and wants to vote

Along with the kind of teenager who gets passionately het up about politics as a kind of abstract and vehicle for high-minded ideals (see illustrative example above), and who has little skin in the game as he or she does not yet pay tax or incur adult responsibilities, the other kind of voice calling to extend the franchise is a certain kind of career politician. Such people are insulated from the consequences of bad politics by an influential network, a good salary and plenty of job opportunities should he or she be voted out. For career politicians advocating the policy, extending the franchise is either a kind of grandstanding (you could call it attempting to cling to the coattails of the Pankhursts perhaps) or (whisper it) perhaps a cynical attempt to recruit an extra 1.5 million voters with little life experience and, it is presumed, in the main quite left-wing ideals.

The problem is that these two groups busy trying to tamper with the franchise, at little personal cost to themselves, are trivialising it in the process. Voting seems trivial to them, because the outcome of general elections don’t change much for them. But regular adult voters, who pay tax or receive benefits, drive on the roads, have to navigate the healthcare etc etc, voting is one of the few real and substantive levers available to make a meaningful impact on the direction of the country. Extending the franchise to children too young to drive, to end their education legally or to live independently without their parents’ permission would confirm the already pervasive suspicion that no serious decision is ever put to the electorate in case they make the wrong choice. (The EU referendum is the single, wonderful, accidental exception to that rule, for which the political class will never forgive David Cameron.)

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote we have a chance to return politics to the people and away from the stifling consensus that has deadened political engagement since the end of the Cold War. As Sam Hooper puts it

for too long Britain has been run by cautious, unambitious identikit drones who nominally belong to Team Red or Team Blue but ultimately hold the same basic worldview and seek to inch us incrementally toward their shared vision of the future, without even thinking to meaningfully consult with the people or explain their actions.

The electorate rejected that consensus, decisively. In Robert Peston’s words, the electorate threw all the cards up in the air because it was our only chance to do so. We have a chance now to return democracy to something in which voters have an impact – an end to consensus politics, a chance to put all the options back on the table, to return to politics red in tooth and claw. But for that to happen, politics has to be the preserve of grownups. I don’t buy this idea that minors should have a say too, because they will live with the consequences longer. If that were the case, my 14-month-old toddler should also have a vote, and hers should count more than the teenager’s since after all she is going to live with the consequences longer. Right?

No. You have to draw a line, and anyone who has spent any time talking to 16-year-olds (the normal sort, not the sort that makes speeches at Labour Party conferences) knows that even 18 is pushing it and 16 is just silly. Unless, that is, you intend for voting to be a kind of decorative ritual on top of a technocratic politics that continues along the path its mandarins consider best regardless of which team is notionally in power. In that case, it makes very little difference whether teenagers vote or not, because it makes very little difference if any of us do. But if we want to preserve voting as something that can obtain a meaningful result, on topics that matter, it should not be the preserve of children.

Leaving aside the merits of either side of that argument, the story is emblematic of a schism within conservatism. On one side sit social conservatives, who believe that tradition, established cultural norms and a sense of continuity with the past are of value. On the other, free marketeers believe that the greatest good can be achieved by permitting the market to develop solutions to people’s needs, with minimal government interference.

Consider a social conservative and a free market conservative take on this story. The free marketeer might say: let them sleep rough – winter will drive them into rentals, the market will find a solution at a suitable price point for them, and in the meantime who am I to criticise someone seeking to reduce his overheads while getting started in a new country?

The social conservative, though, might say: no, that’s not how we do things in this country. It’s not the done thing to save money on housing by creating a tent city in Central London. It’s not on. Mass rough sleeping is squalid, threatening, unhealthy and potentially dangerous. If they cannot live as we live, then they should not be permitted to stay here fouling up the city for people who are doing the right thing.

The social conservative is willing to use the power of social and moral pressure, and if necessary the state, to enforce social norms some of which may run counter to the needs or pressures of the market. From the free-market conservative point of view, the social conservative risks impeding the fluidity of the market, restraining its marvellous problem-solving powers, and does so in the name of social values that may be arbitrary, often seem to have little basis in reason, and yet are clung to with a devotion quite at odds with the free market view of man as a rational actor.

Conversely, the free-market conservative may consider disrupting established social norms or ways of life to be a price worth paying for allowing market forces to flow and find equilibrium. From the social conservative point of view, this might be viewed as a kind of crass vandalism, that reduces all of life to its commercial or economic value and remains wilfully blind to those aspects of life that cannot readily be assigned a number.

For the most part, in party political terms, the natural home of both social conservatives and free marketeers has for some time been the Conservative Party. But these two types of conservative are at odds with one another, or at least not obviously in alignment, on most of the hot-button issues currently in play: from globalisation, immigration, multiculturalism and housebuilding to social questions such as gender issues and the rise of Islam. I am not seeing any sort of intra-conservative debate that recognises the existence of such an ideological fault line. (If I just need a better reading list, I would be grateful to anyone who can improve mine.)

For a number of years, these two kinds of conservatives have maintained a truce and semblance of unity based on the fact that both sides can agree – for different and sometimes contradictory reasons – that state spending should be restrained and ideally reduced. The remainder of Tory policies have been hashed out between the two sides as various kinds of compromise – or, as in the case of Iain Duncan Smith at the DWP versus George Osborne at the Treasury, an increasingly bitter turf war. But trying to sweep it under the carpet is not good enough any more. When one of the few clear positive points of agreement is ‘government should spend less on stuff’ is it any wonder the Conservatives are so easily caricatured by the Left as heartless stealers of the meagre crumbs from the tables of the poor?

Besides, if Osborne vs Duncan Smith was a minor skirmish in the ongoing tussle between social and free market conservatism, the Brexit vote has triggered conservative ideological Armageddon. Conservatives from both sides of the schism wanted to leave the European Union for profoundly different reasons, and in the narratives of – say – Daniel Hannan and Andrea Leadsom you can see the two sides, both passionate and both in search of entirely different and in many ways mutually contradictory outcomes.

Enough of this fudge. The Conservatives need to have it out. One might ask the free market conservatives: how much social and cultural disruption is acceptable in the name of opening up markets? If (say) robotisation decimates employment across entire sectors, are we cool with that? And if so, and you still call yourself a conservative, what precisely do you consider yourself to be conserving?

To the social conservatives, one might ask: to what extent is it important and necessary to restrain markets in order to preserve social goods? Is it worth – for example – deploying protectionist measures to shore up industries that are part of the fabric of the country and culture, even if in doing so we actually damp down innovation and growth overall? Or: you may talk about clamping down on immigration, out of a concern that the native culture is at risk of being overwhelmed. But the Tories have always been for pragmatism over woolly idealism; how then can you call yourself a Tory when you are pushing for a poorer and less dynamic country, all in the name of something nebulous called ‘a way of life’?

What is worth conserving? Do we care about traditions? Does that extend to traditional social or moral views? How much social disruption is acceptable in the name of the markets? When it happens, who bears it, and is that distribution of social cost politically sustainable? Conservatives need to be having these arguments out in the open. And don’t give me that guff about preserving unity while in government. Backstabbing one another over Brexit and cribbing policy from Ed Miliband is not preserving unity.

Social and free market conservatives have rubbed along well enough for some time, mostly by horse-trading or ignoring one another. But Brexit has ended that: there’s suddenly just too much at stake. The ideological fudge has become a bitter paralysis, and it is actively harming the national interest. So for the Tories the choice is stark: carry on treating our departure from the EU as party political psychodrama or, y’know, actually debate the principles informing your vision. Air the differences that have been swept under the rug for so long. Who knows, a good healthy argument might even result in some fresh ideas, and God knows the Tories could do with a few of those.

In a Quillette article about universal basic income and the risk of tyranny, Shai Shapira makes a highly plausible case that political participation develops in direct proportion to the need a state has for its citizens:

We don’t have to go back to ancient history to see this trend – these days we have many countries in the world whose incomes are based on extracting resources from the ground, requiring little to no participation from the common people. Which countries are functioning democracies, and which are autocracies? The World Bank gives us a list of countries ordered by what percentage of their merchandise exports comes from fuels. At 50% or more we find, in this order: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Brunei, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Oman, Norway, Colombia, Bolivia and Bahrain. Can we notice a trend? How many of these countries provide a good set of political rights for their citizens?

This should not be surprising. This pattern is not often discussed, as it conflicts the image we like to have of political rights as being the result of enlightenment and struggle, of the heroes of our past who overthrew despotic regimes and created a better world for everyone. But reality, unfortunately, seems more cynical than that. We do not get our rights because we deserve them, or even because we fight for them – we get our rights because the government needs us. It is a common hope that countries that escape poverty will move on to adopt democracy, and this indeed happened in some notable cases, like South Korea or Taiwan. But South Korea and Taiwan became rich from industry, which means their wealth came from the work of their citizens; meanwhile, Qatar or Angola became rich from natural resources, and their political situation became no better. A country that generates its wealth from its citizens has no choice but to keep those citizens happy, at least to some degree; a country that generates its wealth from oil wells, only needs to keep a handful of mercenaries happy as they guard the access to those wells.

The article is well worth a read. But for me it sparked off a connection with the strange phenomenon we live with nowadays, that of a Labour Party that gives voice to pretty much anyone except the labouring classes. Put simply, the working classes no longer have a major party giving them political representation because the state no longer needs them, and arguably has been working for some decades to ensure that continues to be the case.

Applying Shapira’s insights to the development of mass political participation in the UK, the hypothesis remains plausible. Despite some decades of suffragette agitation, it was not until 1918, when women began to be needed as participants in civic life to replace the men being shipped off to die en masse in the trenches of Europe, that the first women were enfranchised. What is less often remembered is that the same Act also enfranchised some 5 million non-property-owning men. The state needed these men and women – hey presto, improved political participation was the sweetener demanded by the masses in exchange.

Throughout the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries, the United Kingdom derived much of its wealth from manufacturing; the workers who staffed the factories were needed. The same period traces a trajectory of ever-growing mass political participation, and is often narrated as a moral development, a steady march towards enlightenment in the form of the universal franchise. But was it as much about the need to acknowledge reciprocity between the working masses and the political class? The extent to which workers were increasingly able to use the leverage their labour in industry collectively gave them, to demand political concessions from a previously patrician governing class, forms the history of the trade union movement and, from 1900 onwards, the Labour Party.

What followed from the end of World War II until the Winter of Discontent and subsequent election of Margaret Thatcher is, arguably, a tale of this leverage developing first into its strength, then beyond strength to complacency, hubris and stagnation. We all know the denouement, as rolling blackouts left swathes of the country reading by candlelight, rubbish lay uncollected in the streets and the Iron Lady declared ‘There is no alternative’ and deployed all the resources at her disposal to smash the unions. In her grim determination to rein in the unfettered power of trade unionism to bring the country to a standstill, she shuttered entire industries and impoverished vast swathes of the United Kingdom, changes still palpable (and, in parts of the country, unforgiven) today.

Thatcher moved deliberately to tilt the UK’s economy away from manufacturing and towards knowledge and services – notably financial services, the behemoth that now sits astride London, sucking in all cultural capital from the surrounding 300 miles as well as much of the world. That is, she restructured the entire British economy so that the state no longer needed the working classes as it had in the 19th and 20th centuries. Who knows whether she did this intentionally to reduce the workers’ leverage over the state, but that was the effect of the changes she wrought.

The consequence, nearly 40 years on from her first election victory, is that as the political classes’ dependence on a mass industrial workforce has waned, political parties on both left and right are increasingly indifferent to their needs.

Indeed, Tony Blair’s decision in 2004 to open the UK borders to Eastern European EU accession countries meant that the working classes were needed even less than before. Where, a century previously, the supply of labour was relatively static and if the state wanted to ask something significant of the working masses then political sweeteners were needed in exchange, now in the days of free movement it didn’t even matter if the indigenous working classes withheld their labour, as employers would just import replacements from the EU!

Thus was the bond of reciprocity broken between the state and the working classes. Commentators on both right and left now agree – as do the statistics and Labour’s own data – that Labour is now firmly a party of the middle class. Indeed, there is a distinct whiff around much of the left these days of disgust at the working class, as Brendan O’Neill nevertiresof pointing out.

It is no wonder that Labour ceased to see its role as representing the interests of those workers: they had nowhere else to go and would probably continue to vote Labour, so could be taken for granted. The result has been a hollowed-out Labour Party, reduced from a grand coalition of middle-class socialists and working-class firebrands to a kind of well-off clerisy, shy of talking about class but ever so keen to tell you what to think. Ultimately, it has led us to Jeremy Corbyn, a man who speaks entirely to and for the middle classes (free university tuition fees is the sort of outrageous middle-class bung that the Tories would be pilloried for) but does so in a strange, stylised parody of the 1970s, the last days of the trade union Raj.

The only difference between left and right on this front, today, is the consensus on how large the welfare-state bung should be to buy off now politically-irrelevant class. Stereotypically, the Conservatives believe the working masses should be handed free money, buck up, get jobs, pay taxes and become needed by the state so they can participate politically; this view is indifferent to any barriers to doing so. In contrast, Labour believes this class should be treated with patrician generosity, and handed as much free money as necessary to keep them quiescent. In practice, both sides operate the same welfare system, with minor tweaks at the edges blown up by the Westminster bubble into giant ideological differences.

So what is to become of the working masses now? What chance of reclaiming representation? Movements come and go that seek to represent working-class interests: Britain First, the EDL, the Football Lads’ Alliance. Such movements are generally demonised as ‘far-right’ by the chattering classes; and (with the exception of the mass working-class vote to leave the European Union) these movements are largely cultural rather than political, pushing back less against contemporary politics than incursions by foreigners, or political correctness, or other manifestations of the elite’s vision of the good life. If Shapira’s formulation holds good, the masses will have little success in reclaiming political representation until they are actually needed again by the state that governs them. And in a world of increasing robotisation which, instead, proposes to make an ever-greater proportion of the population unnecessary to a state’s prosperity, that seems a prospect both distant and, in its profound implications for the health of our democracy, deeply worrying.

Anyone wrestling with how to reinvigorate the Labour Party should try this simple thought experiment: Imagine the Labour Party were started today, by chavs, for chavs. What policies would it have? How would these policies be funded? And – importantly – how much would it care about the issues currently tearing the Labour Party apart?

In his book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class Owen Jones, the baby-faced darling of the modern left, argues forcefully that by mocking, sneering at or dismissing ‘chavs’ we are contributing to a modern form of class snobbery that effectively blames the working class – or what the working class has now become, in the post-industrial era – for what has politically been done to it via de-industrialisation and Thatcherism.

In this he does at least draw the obvious conclusion, namely that chav is another way of saying ‘working class’. But the book’s argument misses some other important points, perhaps because they hit rather closer to home.

In particular: if chavs are what we now call the working class, why is the Labour Party not stuffed with chavs? Why are chavs not setting the cultural, ideological and political priorities of the Labour Party? Why, instead, does its membership tilt overwhelmingly towards the metropolitan, the graduate, the clean eaters, the politically correct – in a word, the bien-pensant middle classes?

Indeed, if I were to picture what the Labour Party might look like if it were founded and staffed by chavs with a chav political agenda, it would look less like the contemporary Labour Party than the Red Northern end of UKIP, as voiced by Paul Nuttall. An articulate, no-nonsense scouser, Nuttall writes a column in the Daily Star (that most chav of newspapers) covering themes variously patriotic, hostile to political correctness and ranged against Islam, the EU and other chav bugbears. Bugbears which, paradoxically, are central to the nexus of progressive-left values articulated by The Guardian, frequently by the very same Owen Jones whose book enjoins us not to demonise chavs.

What is going on here? On the one hand, we must not demonise chavs, nor sneer at their culture or behaviours, for they are the working class and to be left-wing is to be for the working class, right? But on the other hand, we like the EU, we think diversity and multiculturalism are good things, we are embarrassed about the British Empire and uncomfortable with the notion of cultural Englishness. In liking these things, we do rather look down on people who are uncomfortable about cultural diversity, voted to leave the EU and hang flags on their houses when the football is on.

This circle is squared variously by ignoring it, or else by earnest efforts to ‘educate’ the backward proles into seeing the world otherwise than the way they see it. Little or no attempt is made to consider the viewpoints themselves on their merits, to explore where they come from or – heaven forbid – to voice them.

In this, the current leadership struggles within the Labour Party are revealed for the sterile death-throes they are. One side is attempting to speak for the working class by advocating Thatcherism-lite with a side order of Europhilia, paternalistic redistribution and a hefty spoonful of cultural Marxism; the other proposes to represent the working class by arguing about the legitimacy of the Israeli state, turning a blind eye to Islamism and blaming everything either on a media conspiracy or else on Tory austerity. I would bet confidently that the vast majority of the working class – the chavs – who are purportedly being represented here give precisely zero fucks about either of these packages.

Now and again someone in Labour makes a limp attempt to speak to the chavs. But no-one in Labour speaks from chavland, for the chavs. Out of a cultural squeamishness (dare we call it class snobbery?) within modern Labour the best that can be managed on this front is the occasional dog-whistle. And unless this changes, unless the party finds a way to recruit more chavs into public-facing positions(and why would I join Labour, if I were a chav? I would not expect to be welcome there) it is doomed as a party.

What, then, if the chavs reclaimed the word chav and started a Chav Party? What would a chav manifesto look like? Would it really be as racist as the Guardian fears? I suspect not: the working classes are more ethnically mixed than any other group in this country and fundamentally pragmatic on the whole. Immigration concerns throughout the referendum debate have overwhelmingly been about numbers, not xenophobia. But I would guess that a chav political manifesto would be more patriotic than the Labour Party, more redistributive than the Conservatives and almost certainly more protectionist economically and wary of unfettered globalisation than either. Whatever you might think of its value as a set of policies, this is a mix we do not currently have in the country. I do not expect to see it within Labour any time soon.

Newsflash, Harriet. If you showed an ounce of spine in challenging the sort of vacillating, self-interested equivocation that allows an Oldham by-election to be fought in campaign rallies where women sit off to one side – because it’s cultural discrimination, so that’s OK apparently – then perhaps a few women would take you more seriously when you try and pitch yourself as actually giving a shit about women’s rights. But the Left doesn’t give a shit about women’s rights. This fact is well documented. Like all other types of minority rights, the Left is only interested in women’s rights insofar as they can be used as a platform for virtue-signalling and painting the opposition as nasty antediluvian bigots. But when it comes to actually making difficult decisions, involving actual moral principles rather than a wet sort of relativism allied to a ruthless craving for power, what do we see?

Sit over there, sisters, and welcome to the new champions of tolerance and gender equality.